New sites

As it is evident, i very rarely write about tech things on this blog. I do not know why - mainly i think i am not interested in most of the tech things that come out. My general opinion is that people in tech are creating problems out of thin air and trying to solve them while there are thousands of open problems that no one is trying to work on. Yes, the last comment was directed mainly towards twitter and scores of twitter related products, facebook to some extent and thousands of idiotic iphone/facebook apps that people are trying to create these days.

Yet even in the midst of these fictional products, there are some that stand out - some by their simplicity and some by their application. This post is a review of some of these sites that i am glad exist on web. Lets check them

(a) movies.google.com - Google is releasing many big products such as wave, buzz, etc etc. I have turned all of them off. Yet it is movies.google.com that i have found myself checking it out again and again. It is a very simple interface - all it does is that it takes my zip code and lists theatres soreted by distance and for each theatre the movie listings and their times and for each movie - a link to its trailer and a link to imdb profile. Yes, that's all i care about. I agree that it favors imdb but it follows the 80% rule. The best thing i like is the simple interface to provide a simple functionality. There were many players in this space - fandango etc who were much before than google but it is the interface of movies.google.com that makes it special for me. Ofcourse google does not has to worry about ads etc which gives them an edge but as a consumer, i would even be willing to pay like 5$ for a year to receive this product. Thats just me!

(b) http://www.walkscore.com/ -It is an excellent idea - What this site does is that it takes any address and computes a walk score aka given your address how walkable are places to your home, places like grocery story, cafe, school, bus stop, train station etc etc. And it has cool interface as well. It is a typical west world application in that regard but atleast it is doing something good - encouraging people to buy homes that are walkable. My place's walkable score is 82 out of 100 - http://www.walkscore.com/get-score.php?street=768+rengstorff+ave&go=Go and thats the reason i like where i live :). Thanks Guy for pointing to this site.

(c) http://www.booksalefinder.com/ - Again a very useful site to a book reader. It tells you when is your library's next book sale. Book sales in US are somthing that this country should be incredibly proud of - this culture is awesome. You get excellent books for very cheap prize and people buy books in sacks (no, i am not kidding!) and after reading them, they donate it back. Yes, a lot of people read here esp senior citizens. Although this site is still very web 1.0ish but the content is extremely valuable for any book connoisseur.

(d) meetup.com - As i had written earlier, i joined meetup two months ago and as it is typical of me, i am 2 yrs late when it comes to knowing this site. Meetup.com is a site where people can post meetups about things that they are interested in and othetrs with similar interest can then meet to do it. A very cool idea and what makes it fascinating that it is working! Its a nice to have thing over the web and the range of meetups is very diverse. A great opportunity to meet like minded people. And they have implemented this thing very nicely.

Things missing over the web -
a) imeem replacement - After myspace swallowed imeem and deleted all my playlists/friends, i am at loss of a site that can replace it. If you know anything that is similar to imeem, please let me know.
b) News filter - So many news sources, much of them are junk. a site that can filter junk from rest, that filter has to be customizable. esp for tech news. Techcrunch is going in the direction of punjab kesari, read write web is publishing so many. Have not yet tried Giga OM yet.

Things that are still going good -
a) phulki - although little bit disappointed by their search and lack of some crucial features, this site is still my go to site for indian music.
b) woot - although my addiction has toned down, it is still there.
c) amazon for book reviews.
d) hulu for new tv shows.